Beating The Drums of Marvel's WAR Against DOOM

That’s the view from inside the mind of Doom, but it can also be said looking from the outside in at Marvel’s top echelon of villains. Besides the fact that he has appeared more times than any other villain in Marvel. Doom has stood toe-to-toe with not only the Fantastic Four, but Mephisto, Silver Surfer and Galactus… and best of all, he is Stan Lee’s favorite villain. But although he’s the favorite in one of the principal creator’s of the Marvel U, he’s far from it from the heroic inhabitants of that universe.

And in the upcoming Marvel miniseries Doomwar just announced at today’s Baltimore Retailer Summit, the Marvel U is out to get Doom. Long-time adversaries the Fantistic Four join the X-men, Deadpool, and the Wakandans T’Challa, Storm and the new Black Panther to take on Latveria’s supreme ruler. Although this has been a long time coming, recent events such as his involvement in the Cabal as well as the ravaging of Black Panther have put him at the top of a growing assemblage of heroes’ list.

Crafting the five-issue Doomwar series is writer Jonathan Maberry and artists Will Conrad and Ken Lashley. Maberry is the current scribe of the Black Panther series, and this fresh-faced newcomer to comics is a weathered veteran of the written word with multiple awards (including a Bram Stoker) for his fiction books including Ghost Road Blues and Patient Zero. Between all that, he’s an 8th degree black belt in Shinowara-ryu Jujutsu and is a member of two separate Martial Arts Halls of Fame.

I think that’s a first for a comic writer.

Newsarama talked with the writer about this 2010 miniseries, and what Doom is up against – and what the heroes are after.

Newsarama: Jonathan, what is Doomwar about?

Jonathan Maberry: Doomwar is a major Marvel event where a number of Marvel heroes band together to wage an all-out war against Doctor Doom. The X-Men, Fantastic Four, Deadpool, T’Challa (the former Black Panther) and his wife, Storm; and the current Black Panther. It’s a helluva line-up.

And…they’re not just going to war against Doom, they’re squaring off against his entire network, which includes various villains (human, meta-human and ‘other’) who work behind the scenes to provide Doom with money, materials and muscle. I mean, let’s face it –Doom runs an entire country. You don’t do that alone. And at any given time he’s got a lot of operations going, so there has to be a massive support system and considering who the boss is, that system won’t be made up of nice guys.

Doom has is –and always will be-- a major power player and he’s launched attacks –overt and covert-on several fronts. In the process he’s hurt a lot of people in the Marvel Universe. Everyone has a personal stake in want Doom taken off the board.

So…the time has come for some serious payback.

Nrama: What is the final straw that forces such a large-scale attack on Doom?

Maberry: Capturing Storm and arranging for her to be executed is a start. Also, he tried to murder T’Challa and did murder two of T’Challa’s bodyguards. He’s also destabilized a couple of nations. But the real kicker is that he’s discovered that a certain element found in only one place on earth will increase his powers by an order of magnitude. He obtains some of it and it allows him to create a new generation of Doombots and other weapons that are substantially more dangerous than anything he’s thrown at our heroes before.

If he succeeds in getting enough of it, he will quite simply become the most dangerous person on earth, and possibly in this plane of existence. It would be like him becoming a living Cosmic Cube or the embodiment of the Infinity Gauntlet

Nrama: With his name in the title, let’s talk Victor Von Doom. How do you see him as a character?

Maberry: I’ve always thought that Doom was Marvel’s most fascinating and dangerous villain. I used to write Doctor Doom stories when I was a kid, imagining plots and counterplots going on all the time, and that’s how I still see him. If he’s defeated by, say the FF or Thor or someone, then all that means is that one of his many wheels within wheels goes off the rail; but he always has a hundred other things spinning.

He’s a super genius, a sorcerer, and the head of state. I’m going to show some behind the scenes stuff, so we can see why he’s able to manage so many threats and plots all at the same time. He has a whole lot of very smart, very devious, and very dangerous people working for him.

Doom has done so much harm for so long that he’s created an army of enemies. At the same time he’s amassed quite an army of his own, and the collision will send shockwaves throughout the Marvel Universe. He also has awesome technology that blends machinery with sorcery. I’m going to explore that in Doomwar. We’ll see some very nasty new toys from the Doom arsenal.

Nrama: Coming up against him in this are the X-Men, the Fantastic Four and Deadpool; it seems like an unlikely team-up, so how do they come together?

Maberry: The FF don’t need much urging to sign on, considering the amount of history they have with Doom. More than anyone else on earth, they grasp the scope of Doom’s power and understand his potential. Reed Richards will go to great lengths to stop him. We also get to see a more devious side of Reed and Sue than we’ve seen before.

The X-Men are brought into it initially because Storm is a prisoner of Doom and is scheduled for public execution. Her team-mates are part of a search and rescue operation that warps into a search and destroy. Plus, one of the X-Men’s most feared villains gets an upgrade to become far more deadly. The X-Men have a real stake in making sure this threat is never unleashed on the world.

As for Deadpool, well...depending on which of his personalities you ask, he’s either in it for the money, or in it for the chicks.

Or both.

Probably both.

He gets hired by T’Challa and the Black Panther to come in and lead a special wet-works team, doing some things that the more moral and mainstream heroes would not do.

It’s also important to understand that Doctor Doom is a master strategist; but strategy is based largely on knowing the nature and specifics of your resources. How the hell do you strategize with a wildcard like Deadpool? He’s Chaos Theory in red tights.